Harry Houdini died on Halloween. Of course.

Harry Houdini made his final escape on Halloween 1926. There was no encore.

Looking back 100 years after he died on Oct. 31 of that year, what should we make of him and his signature escape routines today?

Considerable ink has been spilled—much of it fruitlessly—portraying Houdini’s escape act as somehow symbolizing the peculiar desire of the common man from around the turn of the 20th century to slip the yoke of his servitude to society’s ruling caste. According to this reading, the magician’s feats of self-liberation from the restraints of handcuffs, chains and prison cells resonated powerfully with working-class immigrants to the United States (like himself) who felt trapped by economic and social barriers in their daily lives. His escapes thus stand as potent symbols of self-determination, hope and, above all, resistance to authority—from policemen to wealthy elites. 

Like his near-contemporary Charlie Chaplin in his Tramp persona, Houdini was—in this reading—a universal “little man” with whom ordinary people around the world could identify. Implicit in both individuals’ performance is the proposition that life may be hard, but one must never surrender or despair, thus anticipating the self-empowerment ethos of our own age.

I have to say I remain unconvinced. 

It’s almost always a mistake to try to retrofit a particular historical figure, or to assemble random historical facts, into a neatly unified pattern that few people would have recognized at the time. Such judgments are generally possible only with the benefit of hindsight. Few people confronted with the individual pieces of the jigsaw puzzle can picture the completed image. So we can surely treat with skepticism the idea that many potential audience members of the years 1900-26 elected to leave their homes and board the trolley car for their local opera house or civic auditorium in order to watch Houdini in action because of his supposed allegorical insights into their culture. 

Playing to the Crowd

What Houdini offered, of course, was pure entertainment: a beleaguered but indomitable spirit at work, along with an innate sense of stagecraft. Like every truly successful public performer, Houdini was well versed in the props of his profession, which, in his case, included a thudding, “Jaws”-like accompanying musical repertoire (in which he often personally participated) to signal the unfolding drama of the occasion. 

But the instrument he really played best was his audience. Scantily clad female or garishly uniformed male assistants abounded on stage as the actual escape acts progressed, darting hither and thither like shoals of tropical fish. Anyone familiar with the numbing combination of blinding lights and amplified music redolent of today’s typical rock concert need only think of that same experience, but with the added spectacle of actual life-threatening peril, to get some of the flavor. 

Nor was Houdini ever a martyr to false modesty or backward when it came to separating the public from its money. When the prolonged shock of World War I turned popular taste away from escapology and toward the occult promise of reuniting the bereaved with their lost loved ones, he again shrewdly read the runes and incorporated a spiritualist component into his program—first in the form of a straightforward demonstration of the supernatural, and then in debunking those he saw as its obvious charlatans. He had known too many of the latter in their former guises as fellow vaudeville performers to take their purported newfound psychic powers seriously. 

In time, there were also excursions into the world of books and the cinema. When, in 1919, Houdini mass-produced his autograph for sale on a publicity still that apparently showed him clinging for dear life to the wing of a biplane as part of a barnstorming film called “The Grim Game,” he added the inscription: “About 4000 feet in the air.” This was a slight exaggeration, as the photo in question had been taken on the ground.

In fact, Houdini played an often overlooked but significant part in the early development of the motion picture business as a whole. This was an era when magicians were driving cinema innovation with their cheerful little “trick flicks” screened as part of a live act: films that made use of then-novel editing techniques such as multiple exposures, cuts and dissolves, which made images appear to vanish or suddenly to be transformed into something or someone else. Houdini always had an eye trained on his future opportunities as a performer. Apart from “The Grim Game,” he was the leading man in an adventure serial called “The Master Mystery” (1918-19) and a number of sensational melodrama features: “Terror Island” (1920), “The Man From Beyond” (1922) and “Haldane of the Secret Service” (1923). 

The man of talent who longs to be acclaimed for something else is a recurring and often quite endearing figure in the arts. I think it a fair bet that, had he been granted a longer life, Houdini would have increasingly devoted himself to a career both as an actor and as an author as his physical energies inevitably waned. 

Both in his film career and in his latter-day debunking of mediums and clairvoyants, Houdini saw an opportunity to extend a public career that might otherwise have come to a natural end—and indeed did end—in middle age. But he also came to give prominence to something else: a declaration of his Jewish faith. At a time when many of his audiences chose the more secular path epitomized by the clairvoyants, psychics and other seers claiming to master the powers of the occult, Houdini’s core proposition took the opposite trajectory.

In many ways, he was an archetype not only of the hardworking immigrant characteristic of his day, but also of the Jewish American experience as a whole. Perhaps it’s not descending too far into the briar-patch of psychology to suggest that he would become the ultimate symbol of strength to the Jewish community and yet never entirely escape the shackles of antisemitism. Many of Houdini’s contemporary critics resorted to the crudest form of bigotry, and even in death, he could be said to have encountered a strain of religious prejudice. When Houdini’s beloved wife, Bess, followed him to the grave in 1943, her family refused to allow her to be interred with her husband in his tomb at Machpelah Cemetery, the Jewish cemetery in Queens, N.Y., as she had asked, because she was raised a Roman Catholic. 

True Life

For the record, Harry Houdini was not in fact born in Appleton, Wis., on April 6, 1874. The date and place were almost universally accepted during his lifetime, and perhaps form an appropriately false trail for a career dedicated to the art of illusion. He certainly never went out of his way to correct the misconception, which arose from a combination of clerical error and his own reluctance to dwell on his immigrant past. On the day he fell fatally ill in October 1926, he signed a sketch of himself with the inscription “b April 6 ’74, Appleton, Wisc,” and those details duly appear on his death certificate, filed just over a week later.

Houdini wasn’t his real name, of course. He was born Erik Weisz on March 24, 1874, in the family home in the Rákosárok district of Budapest, to the fitfully employed Mayer Weisz and his wife, Cecilia. In 1876, the 47-year-old Mayer took the train from Budapest to Hamburg and from there sailed to a new life in America. Cecilia, their four young sons and a 14-year-old son, Herman, from a previous marriage, would join him there in July 1878, eventually settling in the mill town of Appleton, 100 miles north of Milwaukee. 

Mayer, engaged as the town’s first and then only practicing rabbi, was no more materially successful in his new life than his old one. In 1882, the Weisz family became American citizens, prompting Mayer to write back to friends in Budapest noting proudly that he had learned “to sit up, then to crawl, and finally to walk unassisted” in the New World. 

The assessment was premature. Within six months, he had lost his job, apparently too old at 53 to fulfill the needs of the town’s small Jewish community. In December 1882, Mayer took Cecilia and their now seven children to live in Milwaukee, where he conducted a few impromptu services but failed to excite any interest among the city’s five established synagogues. The records show that the family was soon forced to appeal to the Milwaukee Hebrew Relief Society for coal to see them through the winter. 

A Star Is Born

Legend insists that Houdini opened his first lock at the age of 6 while in pursuit of a piece of pie secured in his mother’s kitchen cupboard. One afternoon in October 1883, when he was 9, he earned 35 cents by making his debut as a trapeze artist called the Prince of the Air in a Milwaukee circus. He went on to appropriate the name of the pioneering French magician Jean-Eugène Robert-Houdin. 

When Mayer Weisz died in October 1892 after cancer surgery, the 18-year-old Harry took his mother aside and tearfully promised her that one day he would shower her in gold, “even if it takes 10 years or more.” Actually, it took only five. In March 1897, Houdini presented himself at a police station in suburban Boston and challenged the amused desk sergeant to slap his best pair of handcuffs on him. The reports of what happened next vary, but all parties agree on the essential fact that Houdini retired to a corner and returned between one and five minutes later, a free man. Having had the foresight to invite the press, he could not have asked for better coverage than that which appeared in the following morning’s Boston Daily Advertiser, which called him the King of Handcuffs.

How did he do it? As is related in several biographies of Houdini, a locksmith named Charles Cortney remarked that it was largely a matter of “diligent homework.” Houdini, with whom he had worked, “had a remarkable knowledge of locks and other devices.” In other words, he knew just where and how to apply the steel pick he generally secreted in his hair, between his toes or elsewhere on his body. Sometimes he equipped himself with an artificial sixth finger attached to one hand, which also acted as a discreet hiding place. Nor was he above offering the occasional bribe to a policeman or other confidant. (“Superintendent Hoy again to hand,” he wrote of one Scotland Yard officer, while on a tour of Britain. “Very touching man. Touched me for Five Quid.”) 

As several newspapers remarked when praising his good manners, Houdini invariably paused before attempting an escape to shake the hands of the assembled witnesses, which, as well as being sporting on his part, would have allowed an accomplice to palm him a key. Some of the milk cans, crates and other containers in which he was confined were later found to be gimmicked with false panels or some other means of egress. When Houdini called for volunteers to come on stage and tie him up, The London Times wrote, “He took care to first expand his chest, [which] he could do to an abnormal degree, without ever seeming to alert the audience.” When the volunteers retired, he would shrink back to normal size and wriggle free from the now-slack restraints. 

Alongside practice, dexterity and brute physical force, there were also elements of the performance that to this day defy any rational explanation. No less a judge than Arthur Conan Doyle, the creator of Sherlock Holmes, never quite knew what to make of Houdini’s act after he first witnessed it on the London stage in April 1920. Three months later, the creator of the world’s most famously rational detective publicly announced that this “God-given performer” possessed a “dematerialising and reconstructing force [that] could separate the molecules” of any solid object toward which it was directed. “My dear chap,” he later wrote to Houdini in a letter that is now in Doyle’s archives at Cambridge University, “Why go around the world seeking a demonstration of the occult when you are giving one all the time? Mrs. Guppy [a Victorian mesmerist] could dematerialise, and so could many people in Holy Writ, and I do honestly believe that you can also.”

“Such a gift is not given to one man in a hundred million,” Doyle concluded, “that he should amuse the multitude or amass a fortune.”

Competitors and Antagonists

Time and again, Houdini’s own diaries speak of his revulsion at the “so-called miracle workers, augurs and diviners” whom he believed to be a lower class of humanity than that of the highway robber—“at least the latter had the grace to prey upon his victims in broad daylight,” he remarked. Over time, his mission to expose such charlatans strained his friendship with Conan Doyle to its breaking point. 

In June 1922, the two men attended a séance in the Ambassador Hotel in Atlantic City at which Doyle’s second wife, Jean—a medium who claimed to be adept at the art of automatic writing—scribbled out a 15-page message supposedly from Houdini’s beloved mother Cecilia, who had died nine years earlier. As a report from the afterlife, it was only partly convincing. Although Houdini held his tongue at the time, he privately concluded that Jean was not a true medium. His Jewish mother would never have drawn the sign of the cross atop each page of a message to her son; nor did it strike him as likely she would have chosen to communicate in fluent English, a language she had never spoken.

Somehow inevitably, in time Houdini’s crusade brought with it an antisemitic backlash. Unappreciative comments were made about him on the floor of the U.S. Senate. These paled in comparison to some of the abuse apparently channeled from departed spirits at séances, many of whom, perhaps taking advantage of the anonymity afforded them, abandoned the pretense of civility and depicted Houdini in the most ribald terms. 

It has even been said that the spirit of mutual hostility with the psychic community ultimately led to Houdini’s death, which was supposedly brought about when a series of muscular young men in the pay of the spiritualist camp followed him about while he undertook a theatrical engagement in Montreal. One of their number, a local postgraduate student by the name of Jocelyn Whitehead, quoting the magician’s own boast that he could withstand any blow without pain, suddenly struck him with sufficient force to rupture his already inflamed appendix, which induced a fatal case of peritonitis.

Despite some continuing internet-based speculation, there is no evidence that Whitehead was in fact acting as part of a larger conspiracy, nor that he was anything more than the unwitting agent of Houdini’s death, as both the Montreal police and the New York Life insurance company concluded at the time. The victim in this case was 52, in poor overall health, and the treatment for his condition in those pre-penicillin days was both crude and generally ineffective. 

Reckoning

Whatever the precise cause, it seems fair to say that nothing in Houdini’s life became him like the leaving of it. Eventually confined at Grace Hospital in Detroit, he suffered grievously during his final week. Despite this, he roused himself sufficiently to fire off a series of encouraging cables to friends and admirers around the world, including one that remarked evenly: “I am not feeling at my best just now” but insisting, “I will get over this waviness in no time.” 

As his condition worsened, however, he gave his wife elaborate instructions as to how to attempt to contact him in the afterlife and finally looked up to quietly tell his younger brother Theo, “I guess I’m all through fighting.” They were his last words. Houdini died later that day of what the doctors called “Diffuse peritonitis [with] complications,” much the same condition that had carried away another immigrant entertainer who had spectacularly made his name in America, Rudolph Valentino, just 10 weeks earlier. 

Seeming to fulfill at least one part of a recent prediction made about him from the stage of a well-publicized spiritualist rally at New York’s Madison Square Garden, Houdini’s own time of death was recorded as 1:26 p.m. on Sunday, Oct. 31, 1926—Halloween. Exactly a decade later, Bess finally abandoned her attempts to reach her husband from beyond the grave. “Ten years is long enough to wait for any man,” she remarked.

Which returns us to the question: Who, in fact, was the self-invented character known as Harry Houdini? A powerful human symbol of the working man’s eternal desire to slip the bonds of his servitude to society’s elite? Possibly. An ambitious and resourceful immigrant child who quickly absorbed the lessons he learned of what it took to separate the American public from their money? Almost certainly. A peerless showman prepared to subject himself to extreme physical discomfort, and on occasion mortal peril, in order to entertain his audience? Definitely. 

Houdini was, at different times and to varying degrees, all of these things and more. I continue to think of him as the ultimate “spiritualist,” in the sense both of his perpetual search for the true meaning of life and of the quiet dignity with which he left it 100 years ago this Halloween. Now that all the drama and clatter and musical crescendos that punctuated his most famous performances have died down, there is only a faint rhythmical sound ruffling the horizon in his wake. It is the sound of Houdini’s numerous successors and imitators counting the returns at their respective box offices around the world.

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